Hashnode, a blogging platform built for the global software developer community, announced today it has raised $6.7 million in early funding led by Salesforce Ventures.

The Series A funding round was also joined by Sierra Ventures, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and Accel Partners, as well as a number of angel investors. The fundraise follows a $2.1 million seed round in December.

Launched in June 2020, Hashnode was designed and optimized with the vision of giving the world’s developers a platform to share knowledge and connect with one another. The company was founded by Chief Executive Officer Frazle Rahman and Chief Technology Officer Sandeep Panda with a simple premise: Allow developers to connect easily with each other, and their readers, and grow a community.

“Software developers are valuable members of the creator economy, fueling today’s most innovative technologies,” said Rahman. “We launched Hashnode because this group deserves a blogging platform built just for them – one where they can easily find each other, share ideas with like-minded professionals and collaborate to build game-changing technology.”

In the platform’s early days, it attracted 100,000 monthly active users and, in the past year, that number has expanded to more than a million, with more than 60,000 active blogs.

Hashnode does not use paywalls, because it reckons they split up the community between free and premium users. The intent of the platform is to maintain a sense of free availability and knowledge sharing. Readers are encouraged to tip authors, which allows software developers to make money from their work. Authors also fully own their Hashnode blogs and can map them onto their own domains and thus never lose access to their content.

“What Hashnode is doing for the developer community is transformative,” said Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom and angel investor. “Developers want to connect with each other, share ideas and code, but still own their creations and have them easily accessible, no sign-ins or paywalls.”

Developer-centric features of Hashnode include custom stylesheets, out-of-the-box analytics, embeds and code support and bulk imports from other blogging platforms for migration. The platform also permits powerful integrations with other developer tools such as GitHub, Google Analytics, Hotjar and other tools that developers would be familiar with in their everyday lives.

The company said the funds will be used to continue to expand the platform’s user base, recruit new talent and introduce new features. One feature Hashnode is working on includes rolling out Team Publication, which will be a service aimed at allowing businesses to power their own engineering and tech blogs. Hashnode also intends to launch its own iOS- and Android-compatible mobile apps.

“With this new funding, we expect we’ll be able to reach even more users across the globe, helping to create a thriving, rich network that elevates the entire profession,” said Rahman.

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